The principal objective of this research is to clarify the independent importance of a variety of factors associated with parental separation (specifically, the absence of the father in the home) on the subsequent cognitive and socioemotional development of a national sample of children who have been born to a representative national cross-section of American mothers who are 21 to 28 years of age in 1986. The research will measure the independent effects of (1) the age of the child when the father left the home, (2) the duration since the father left, (3) maternal employment transitions in the period surrounding the transition, (4) childcare in the years following the transition, (5) the presence of selected relatives (e.g., grandparents, other male adults) in the period following the transition, and (6) father visitation patterns and remarriage on a range of measured child cognitive and socioemotional outcomes. Standard multivariate techniques (OLS) will be used controlling for a large variety of family, maternal, and child social, economic, psychological, and physiological attributes which available literature suggests may be correlated with both marital disruption and the various child outcomes. The research will additionally contrast, using longitudinal data, the employment, education, income, and childcare status and household structure of the homes of young children in father- present and father-absent environments, and describe how these socioeconomic and demographic factors changes as a family moves from father-present to father-absent status. The study will use data for the 3,000 mothers and 5,500 children in the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience of Youth. A complete longitudinal record of the employment, educational, training, and family related experiences of these women and their families is available, having been collected on a continuing basis between 1979 and 1986. The sample includes an overrepresentation of disadvantaged white, black, and Hispanic women and children and overall attrition for this longitudinal survey between 1979 and 1986 was less than seven percent. This research will be able to more comprehensively consider for a contemporary generation of children the effects of a father's absence from the home on young children than has been previously possible. This is because the NLSY includes as of 1986 about 2,400 children in father-absent households, and the data set includes a much wider range of background and contemporaneous social and economic controls than other researchers have typically had available.